Demon

Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, Jonathan Bowden wrote 27 books, about which almost nothing was known until after his death. Combining cultural criticism with memoir, high journalism, and selected correspondence, these texts belong to no particular genre, the prose being allowed to roam where it may, drawing from many strands, finding unexpected links, and collecting shrewd insights along the way. More than anything, they are exercises in exploration and self-clarification, wherein one will find, as work in progress, many of the themes that would later emerge in his orations.

In Demon, Jonathan explores the topic of Jack the Ripper, the brutal serial killer from the foggy and pestilential backstreets of London, who savagely murdered and mutilated a string of prostitutes in the late Victorian era, and who later vanished, having never been identified by the police. The book begins with a survey of the different theories as to the killer’s identity—from royals to Freemasons—and ends with a free-flowing discussion on the relationship between art and crime—a subject matter which, as an outsider artist, and as one with an interest in all that is primal, nihilistic, and dark in the soul of man, was of enduring fascination for this unique author. Demon is not an essay in any conventional sense. The present edition incorporates the author’s hand-written corrections to the text.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Bowden, April 12, 1962–March 29, 2012, was a British novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, actor, and orator, and a leading thinker and spokesman of the British New Right. He was the author of some 40 books — novels, short stories, stage and screen plays, philosophical dialogues and essays, and literary and cultural criticism — including Pulp Fascism: Right-Wing Themes in Comics, Graphic Novels, and Popular Literature, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2013) and Western Civilization Bites Back, ed. Greg Johnson (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2014).